B. Schlerath

Habib Borjian

(also Osimi and Asimov) Tajik educator, scholar, statesman, and humanist (b. Ḵojand, 1 September 1920; d. Dushanbe, 29 July 1996). His primary subject of interest was philosophy in the broad sense of the word, with particular attention to the achievements made in the East.

K. Amīrī Fīrūzkūhī

C. F. Albright

“melody of the ʿāšeq,” term referring to (1) a type of poem often sung by ʿāšeqs in Iranian Azerbaijan and (2) the typical manner of singing the poem and the manner of accompanying it on the musical instrument.

C. E. Bosworth

B. Spuler

Mahnaze A. da Silveira

Throughout her life, Ghodsieh Ashraf repeatedly observed, not without pride, that her material belongings could be packed into one suitcase. Though she may not have been an easy taskmaster, she was served by an unflagging joie de vivre and cut a figure distinct from the traditional models of her times.

B. Schlerath, P. O. Skjærvø

M. Harverson

or āsīāb, "mill." Before World War II most grain ground to produce flour for the staple in the Iranian diet, bread, was processed by traditionally powered mills, principally watermills. Except in remote areas they have been replaced by diesel or electrically-driven mills, and old machinery has fallen derelict.

Richard N. Frye

founded in 1928 in New York City as the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, incorporated 1930 in the state of New York and active in Shiraz 1965-79. In its affiliation, functions, and publications, the Institute has had a complicated and eventful career, illustrating some of the vicissitudes of Iranian studies during the twentieth century.

Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh

E. Ehlers

The Ask springs, like those in other places around the base of Damāvand, are as yet used only by the local inhabitants. It remains to be seen whether they would repay commercial development (in the form of spa baths, bottling plants, etc.).

Ahmad Kazemi Mousavi and EIr

J. A. Delaunay

king of Assyria 680-69 B.C., son of Sennacherib and father of Aššurbanipal. Here only Assarhaddon’s relations with the Cimmerians and Mannians, and the Medes, are described. The Cimmerians with an admixture of Scythians came down from the Caucasus about 700 B.C. and began to press on the eastern borders of Assyria.

Cross-Reference

J. A. Delaunay

The Cimmerians (Gimirru) had entered Assyria about 700 B.C. but were stopped by Assarhaddon and so turned towards Lydia (Luddu). The king of Lydia, Gyges (Gūgu, Guggu), who had founded the Mermandes dynasty, following the advice of the god Aššur in a dream, sent a delegation to Aššurbanipal to ask for assistance.

M. Dandamayev, È. Grantovskiĭ, K. Schippmann

M. Dandamayev and È. Grantovskiĭ

Texts belonging to the 9th-7th centuries B.C. provide valuable data on the expeditions of Assyrian kings to Iranian territory, including “Messages to the Deity” and summaries of royal victories presented in geographical order.

M. Dandamayev

K. Schippmann

In 141 B.C. the Parthian king Mithridates I conquered large parts of Mesopotamia, including probably Assyria. Although the Parthians were soon driven back out of Mesopotamia, Assur finally fell under Parthian influence from the reign of Mithridates II onwards.

R. Macuch, A. Ishaya

The development of the modern concept of “Assyrians” among the East Syrian Christian communities began with Botta’s excavation of the palace of Sargon II in Khorsabad (1843), followed by Layard’s discovery of Nineveh. This research opened the eyes, not only of the West, but also of the ethnically nameless Aramean population in these regions which had been satisfied to identify itself by religions denominations.

R. Macuch

Clearly, this small ethnic group divided into different confessions needed special arguments for accepting a standard name “Assyrians” after this term had already been accepted, for practical reasons, by others.

R. Macuch

Although there were four missionary printing-houses in Urmia before the end of World War I, the Iranian Assyrian writers and poets were producing much more than they were able to publish. Many of their literary products remained in manuscript or were published only posthumously.

A. Ishaya

The dispersion of the Assyrians took place during World War I, when the whole nation was uprooted from its homegrounds. The diaspora is still in progress. Presently in the Middle East, besides Iran, Assyrian settlements are located in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey.

Eckart Ehlers, Marcel Bazin, and Christian Bromberger

Multiple Authors

M. Bazin

The rural inhabitants grow rice, wheat, and vegetables on the coastal plain and wheat, corn (maize), and fruit trees on the lower slopes of the mountains, and graze flocks and herds between qešlāq and yeylāq.

A. Sh. Shahbazi

D. Pingree

The altitude of the sun or of the star is determined by an observation through the alidade on the back; the rim of the upper two halves of the back is graduated from 0° to 90° from the horizontal diameter (horizon) to the apex (zenith).

B. Spuler

Cross-Reference

D. Pingree, C. J. Brunner

Highly relevant are the subjects Mithraism and Zurvanism. It is here assumed that the exposure of Zoroastrian priests to Near Eastern divination, from the Achaemenid period on, helped foster cosmological speculation; and this developed a body of myth around Zurwān “Time.”

M. Dabīrsīaqī

M. Boyce

“fire” in Zoroastrianism. The hearth fire, providing warmth, light and comfort, was regarded by the ancient Iranians as the visible embodiment of the divinity Ātar, who lived among men as their servant and master. Fire was also present at their religious ceremonies.

M. Boyce

Saeed Rezaei

Missing the bucolic backdrop of his childhood, Manucher Atashi soon dropped out ofschool and left the city to live in Čāh-kutāh, a village near Bušehr, where he worked as a shepherd and fell in love with a young girl, who eventually married another man and died at an early age.

Helmut Slaby

X. Tremblay and N. Rastegar

The present entry is intended as a synthetic history of the organization of Iranian studies (1) up to 1918 in all the Habsburg “hereditary countries,” which included the present Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, also parts of Poland, Romania, and Ukraine, and (2) since 1918 in the Republic of Austria exclusively.

R. Hewsen

G. Tsuge

Āvāz as a musical term has three basic meanings: (1) The classical vocal style of Iran, which is based on the elaborate modal system called dastgāh and sung mainly to classical Persian verses. (2) “Tune.” This term is used to denote an auxiliary mode in the dastgāh system.

David Blow

The most important part of Avery’s published works consists of translations of Persian poetry, in particular the ghazals (ḡazal) of Hafez, the Persian poet for whom he felt a special empathy. He began translating some of the ghazals while still a student at SOAS.

Multiple Authors

J. Kellens

“Avesta” is the name the Mazdean (Mazdayasnian) religious tradition gives to the collection of its sacred texts. The etymology and the exact meaning of the name (Pahlavi ʾp(y)stʾk/abestāg) can not be considered established.

Alberto Cantera

The ritual Avestan texts belonging to the great rituals are transmitted through two different kinds of manuscripts: the Sāde manuscripts, containing only the Avestan text, and the so-called Pahlavi manuscripts, which include the Pahlavi translations.

G. Gnoli

K. Hoffmann

The Avestan script is based on the Pahlavi script in its cursive form. The earliest Pahlavi manuscripts date from the fourteenth century A.D., but the Pahlavi cursive script must have developed from the Aramaic script already in the first centuries A.D.

M. Boyce

Abbas Atrvash

Originally the Iranian government had approached the U.S. administration to negotiate the purchase of American military aircrafts and to organize the training of pilots and technicians. But the Americans rejected the request, arguing that such an agreement would violate the disarmement clauses of the post-World War I peace treaties.

Sh. B. Abed

philosopher whose works on logic are extant, and most of them have been published. With the exception of two Persian works, Dāneš-nāma-ye ʿalāʾī and Andar dāneš-e rag, all of his works are written in Arabic.

O. Wright

B. Musallam

In the works of Avicenna, the two great traditions,Galen and Aristotle, intersected. Avicenna wrote the medieval textbook of Galenic medicine the Qānūn (the Canon), as well as the central medieval statement of Aristotelian biology (the Ḥayawān, the biological section of the Šefāʾ).

W. Eilers

A. Tafażżolī

Paul Bernard

or AÏ KHANUM (Tepe), a local Uzbek name designating the site of an important Greek colonial city in northern Afghanistan excavated since 1965 by a French mission and which belonged to a powerful hellenistic state born of Alexander’s conquest in Central Asia (329-27 B.C.)

M. Boyce

S. Shaked

a popular-religious andarz composition in Pahlavi, attributed to one of the best-known sages of the Sasanian period, Wuzurgmihr (Bozorgmehr) ī Buxtagān, who was active at the court of Ḵosrow I Anōšīravān (531-79 A.D.).

G. Böwering

P. Oberling

Habib Borjian

As a textual and literary critic, Kamāl ʿAyni centered his work on Persian works of the Timurid era and contiguous periods, mainly the 15th and 16th centuries. He thus published a number of essays and monographs.

O. Grabar

E. J. Keall

Ayvān-e Kesrā has been described in Arabic and Persian sources and is the subject of a moving qaṣīda by the poet Ḵāqānī who visited its ruins in mid-6th/12th century. Once the most famous of all Sasanian monuments and a landmark in the history of architecture, it is now only an imposing brick ruin.

Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh

J. P. Asmussen

M. Bazin

Zelkova crenata or Siberian elm, a tree of the Ulmaceae family, for which also other scientific names, such as Zelkova carpinifolia, Zelkova hyrcana, Planera crenata, and Planera Richardi, have been proposed.

J. T. P. de Bruijn

Bāqer ʿĀqeli

ABD-AL-QADIR AZAD published a newspaper, which he named Āzād (liberal, free), in Mašhad. In the editorials of this newspaper he attacked the government, and criticized the authorities severely. His paper was eventually banned by the newly-formed government of Reżā Shah Pahlavi, and ʿAbd-al-Qadir, who had by now assumed the name “Āzād” after his newspaper, was himself imprisoned.

K. N. Pandita

Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh

MAHYAR ENTEZARI

(ʿAzādārān-e Bayal; The mourners of Bayal, Tehran, 1964). The collection comprises eight interconnected stories, called Qeṣṣa. Sharing characters and not unlike a novel, they revolve around the inescapable horrors of death, disease, drought, and famine in a fictitious village named Bayal.

ʿA. ʿA. Kārang

P. O. Skjærvø, Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh, J. R. Russell

“dragon,” various kinds of snake-like, mostly gigantic, monsters living in the air, on earth, or in the sea (also designated by other terms) sometimes connected with natural phenomena, especially rain and eclipses.

C. E. Bosworth

B. Kuniholm

Upon entering Iran, the Soviets dismantled frontier and customs posts between Iran and the USSR, and set up military posts on the southern border of the Soviet occupied zone. The de facto result was extension of the Soviet frontier into Iran.

G. Doerfer

W. Kleiss

comprises the two Iranian provinces of West Azerbaijan and East Azerbaijan, with administrative centers at Urmia (before 1979 Reżāʾīya) and Tabrīz respectively; it does not include “Northern Azerbaijan,” centered on Baku, which since 1829 has belonged to the Russian empire.